An Indian-origin boy in the United Kingdom has managed to score higher than Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking in an IQ test, making him one of the smartest people around.

Arnav Sharma, who is just 11 years old, is already considered a prodigy because of a device he has built using the Raspberry Pi platform that helps people with asthma lead a better lifestyle.

And he won the Tech4Good award for it last year, when he had not even crossed into double digits when it came to age! Arnav currently attends Crossfields School on near Reading in the UK. He has already been selected for Eton College and Westminster.

Arnav's IQ score is in the field of verbal reasoning, and he told The Independent about the IQ test and the score: "I had no preparation at all for the exam but I was not nervous. My family was surprised but they were also very happy when I told them about the result."

The test

The test young Arnav has aced is a standardised set of questionnaire developed and administered by Mensa International — the world's oldest IQ society and a non-profit organisation.

A person has to score 140 or more on the test in order to be considered a genius. Arnav has scored 162 on the test, which is well above the genius threshold.

This is well above the IQ of celebrated cosmologist and A Brief History Of Time author Stephen Hawking, which is 160. It is also above the IQ of Einstein — whose surname has became synonymous with people with high IQ, but is sometimes used in a pejorative manner.

Prodigious talent

Arnav's mother Meesha Dhamija Sharma was circumspect about the examination. "I was thinking what is going to happen because you never know and he had never seen what a paper looks like," she told the UK-based daily.

However, she had had her first inkling of his talent almost a decade ago. "At one-and-a-half years old I took him to India for a holiday to see his grandparents. His grandmother told me about him and said Arnav is going to do very well with his studies," she said.

A year later, he was showing his prowess with numbers. "He was counting up to more than 100. That was when I stopped teaching him because I came to know that there is no end to his numbers," said his mother.

She added: "His dad is quite clever as well, but not as clever [as Arnav]."